The process industry goes through rigorous planning, designing, construction, and operating procedures. Plant conditions fluctuate all the time, but the plant also has multiple modes of operation, e.g. summer mode, winter mode; normal throughput, reduced or increased throughput; also different grades of product or a different feedstock require the plant to operate in a different mode.
The existing method of comparing a model to plant data is time consuming. Process engineers typically do not have direct access to tools to access live plant data, requiring collaboration with operations personnel. Large volumes of plant data are exported to spreadsheets and events are analyzed using spreadsheet plotting tools. Having identified an event, values are copied from the spreadsheet to modeling tools. Some existing techniques for plant data measurements also include manual plant measurements from data historians, which do not provide real-time data. Some existing techniques for simulation include batch simulations, which are computationally intensive, and therefore do not complete quickly enough to be presented in a real-time manner. All of these existing methods may be time consuming.